CEA blog on math education and ‘armchair educators’

He writes: ” The Discovery Math vs back-to-basics debate is dominated by “armchair educators”- people who rarely have the responsibility of helping a group of students understand a math concept. Teachers don’t have the luxury of discounting any approach that might help a student learn more effectively.”

And “Students learn math from Junior Kindergarten into high school by sharing ideas and they communicate that understanding in a variety of ways (writing, speaking, drawing diagrams, etc). But on standardized tests, there’s only one way to represent your understanding, only one right answer, and students can’t ask questions. It isn’t surprising that some students struggle to make that transition. Why don’t we ever stop to consider that maybe the test might be the problem?”

I bet there are lots of opinions on this! Rowan

PS Related to this, remember waaay back in 2014, an announcement was made that a research study was going to be conducted into the JUMP program [blog]? I checked with one of the researchers and the results have not been released yet (it was a huge analysis and complex), but the expectation is that the final report will be released soon.